The enigmatic Aldous Harding: ‘I’m like the Jim Carrey of the indie world’
“Part of what I do is treading the line between flow state and dissociation – being present and being somewhere else,” Aldous Harding says thoughtfully over video call.
For the duration of our conversation at least, the songwriter is quite present. She is bundled up in her mother’s back yard in rural New Zealand, puffing on a cigarette as she looks out over a lawn, a shed and a ball of ginger fur that looks like a cat.
“That’s a dog,” Harding corrects me. “It’s not your fault – she looks like a cheap wig. Her name’s Jessie, she’s a pomeranian, she’s a nightmare.”
The lilt of her New Zealand accent gives an odd, familiar poetry to the words “cheap wig” – it’s just the kind of crisp, slightly absurd imagery often found in her lyrics.
It was here that Harding finished writing the bulk of her fourth album Warm Chris, bunkering down with Jessie and her mother, Lorina, during the first of 2020’s lockdowns, before heading to Monmouth in Wales to record with John Parish, her longtime producer with whom she shares an almost wordless rapport. (“Our gifts have a really lovely way of communicating without us,” she says of Parish, who also worked on albums Party and Designer.)
A week out from the album’s release, she’s back home again. Birdsong
rings loudly in the long, full gaps between words as Harding thoughtfully coaxes out each sentence – some people talk just to fill out the silence, Harding is happy to sit in it.
“I feel like I get asked the question a lot that my songs have a lot of space, and there’s a lot of silence in my music,” she says. “And I don’t hear it. But I think that’s because I think silence can be louder than all that other stuff. Waiting for sound can be louder than filling it all up.”
Harding often speaks with a kind of half-apologetic resignation. Now in her fourth album cycle, she does press like she’s Bill Murray halfway through Groundhog Day, pre-empting questions that have derailed past interviews before I’ve had a chance to broach them.
If there’s a beguiling opacity to her public statements, it’s in step with her lyrics. On Warm Chris she ranges from breezily evocative similes (“The weather opened up like a birthday card,” she sings on second single Fever) to more obscure reflections (“Here comes life with his leathery whip”), but even more so than her earlier albums, it’s less about what the words mean than how they feel when Harding sings them.
“For this album I was a lot less focused on ‘poetry’, as I understand it,” she says. “I was more focused on phonics, pure phonics. Letting sounds stand alone as poetry against their background, just the sound of the word, rather than people knowing [the meaning].”
On her new album that “background” is populated by rubbery basslines and chiming piano chords – teaching herself to play piano was another project during that first lockdown. There’s a buoyancy to Warm Chris that’s a long way from the maudlin folk of her earlier work, and a sense of play as Harding rolls those words and phonics around every corner of her mouth.
“I use my voice like language or clothing,” she says, of the slippery character of her vocals. “I understand that that’s really interesting to people … I’m sort of like the Jim Carrey of the indie world or whatever.
“I use whatever sounds I need to fill the gaps in my musical universe. I make songs that I want to hear, how I get there really does feel handed to me.”
I wonder aloud if part of people’s fascination with her inscrutability – in her lyrics, her stage presence, her surreal video clips – stems from the authenticity listeners usually expect from singer-songwriters.
“The authenticity is that I don’t know how to be authentic,” Harding reflects. “That is me being authentic. It would be as inauthentic for me to resist my gifts and the need that I feel to spend time with these voices, spend time with these people. I don’t know what ‘my voice’ sounds like.”
Near the end of the interview I ask if staying with her mother, herself an award-winning folk singer, affected her writing.
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“She would come out with a cup of coffee or a story from work – to be honest I’m one of those awful children who is quite private,” she says, miming herself shooing her mother out of her room like a teenager.
“Because I think my mother was excited for me to be who I am now, before I was, and I resisted it for a long time. She bought me a guitar for Christmas when I was seven or eight, and my stepfather at the time owned a guitar shop and music was everywhere.
“But I didn’t want what they had. I think some children want to do what their parents do, and other children want to do anything else. I was the latter – I had other plans, I had big plans.
“Unfortunately, this is as close to a gift as I got. I see no point in resisting any more.”
Aldous Harding’s new album Warm Chris is out now via 4AD